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Climate change a funny business

Frank O'shea

The fact that some of these brave climate deniers are privately funded by coal companies and farmers and the tobacco lobby is neither here nor there. Photo: Simone De Peak

Scientists all over the world, with a few brave exceptions, are saying that we are producing too much carbon dioxide and this is warming the planet, and one of these days the sea will come in and flood Sydney Airport and parts of Wollongong.

Those who question this assumption are laughed at, but they insist they are just as entitled to their view, that it is their human right and that only totalitarian regimes interfere with freedom of expression, and if this country could only get a Bill of Rights they might be able to find a lawyer to sue those who are laughing at them.

They point out that for more than 5000 years after God made the Earth, people believed it was the centre of the universe and were able to quote Jewish folklore and Greek philosophers to support their argument, and everybody was happy.

Then a Polish priest suggested that everyone was wrong and the Earth was just another planet. Mind you he waited until he was on his deathbed because he knew the establishment would laugh at him like they are doing to those who deny climate change today.

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Then came Kepler and Newton and they said gravity was the cause of it all and that everything was attracted to everything else. When it was pointed out that this was crazy, that for example most people were repelled by other people and even prepared to go to war to show how repelled they were, no one paid them any attention.

Science decreed that things were attracted and that was that, even though the only proof they could give was that an apple fell on Newton's head.

Then Einstein told us that we were all sliding along the inside of a cosmic fishing net. That didn't sound much better, but people said he was entitled to his view. And now they are saying he was right, though I'm not sure how he explained the apple.

I give you those three examples of how people who buck the scientific establishment can sometimes be right and that we shouldn't believe something just because everyone is saying it. One of the characters in Flann O'Brien's classic The Third Policeman had a theory that the Earth was sausage-shaped, and he held that view with the same kind of determination as the climate deniers today.

We are told that the ice in Greenland is melting and will come down here and flood us. Don't they have any idea of how far away Greenland is? And even if it does melt, the extra water will flood other places first. Like Ireland.

For years people have been saying what a blessing it would be if part of that place was towed into the Atlantic and sunk; now, global warming could save the European Union that expense as well as the fortune they are spending on keeping the rest of the place afloat.

Anyway, look at the people who are proposing this climate catastrophe theory. They are all from universities and research institutes which depend on funding to keep going. And since most of those funds come from governments, of course they are going to say what the governments want to hear. Piper and tune come to mind.

As to where this carbon dioxide is coming from, they tell us it is from burning coal to produce electricity and from cows belching.

They are researching other ways of getting power, like using uranium or wind or solar panels, and they don't expect us to notice that there are commercial interests involved in all of those things as well.

Some of them are even trying to breed cows that don't belch.

The fact that some of these brave climate deniers are privately funded by coal companies and farmers and the tobacco lobby is neither here nor there.

Fortunately for this country, they have support from a few politicians with constituencies in coal mining areas or farming areas or just Queensland.

So I come back to my main point which may have been lost in the prose: just because the majority of scientists believe in climate change does not mean that we don't have the right to our own opinion.

Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce are in the same distinguished line of dissenters as Copernicus and Einstein and the Earth-as-a-sausage people.

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